Dogfolk
__FORCETOC__ The 'Dogfolk '(Houndstongue: Cootath, "hound-people") were the ethnically Celtic, canine-human hybrids that had formed an independent and isolated tribe in what would eventually be called the Greenbrier Valley in southeastern West Virginia, United States, centering on a small community that would come to be known as Dog's Creek, which would be later renamed Tempest. Although wiped out in the summer of 1666 by Nicholas Lightfoot, his companions from the Virginia Colony (including Bernard Barnes) and his Native American allies, the bloodline of the Dogfolk survived through to Bligh Lynch in matrilineal descent from the last chief, Wurdan, through his daughter Wanata. The bloodline survives separately through Wurdan's, Wolkee, and the latter's son, Duke, prior to his death. Origin The complete origins of the Dogfolk derive from two Celtic groups: the first Hiberno-Pictish (and Scots), the second Welsh. The Voyage of Saint Brendan The Irish abbot Wikipedia:Saint Brendan, as chronicled in the Voyage that bears his name, took a group of followers -- Pictish, Scottish, Irish –- on a transatlantic voyage, accidentally discovering the continent of North America well before Leif Eriksson did the same. They reached the Chesapeake Bay (roughly halfway through the conventional chronology of the Voyage), and while some of the sailors stay behind, and Brendan himself turned around and went home to Ireland. Stone circles and Ogham carvings in Appalachia, particularly West Virginia, remain on the fringe of accepted archaeological studies in both reality and in the Dogsverse, but within the latter, do in fact constitute tangible evidence of lost pre-Columbian penetration of Irish, Pictish, and Scottish nomads on their journey from the Delmarva Peninsula into the Appalachian Mountains. Piecing these together, one can map the journey from the east coast around AD 525, to the final settlement in the Greenbrier Valley about five years later. This tiny group of men and women, accompanied by their dogs (Irish cú which became the Houndstongue term coo), reached the Greenbrier Valley, having been nomadic for several years constituted the nucleus and genesis of the Dogfolk tribe. How and why the mutations that led to the DNA-merging of dog and human -- not to say the extreme sexual dimorphism that would follow -- is unclear. Based on the tales told to Wolkee as a young lad, there would elapse about a quarter-century after the settlement of the Greenbrier before the religio-spiritual practices using hallucinogenic mushrooms, and several presumed decades of experimentation before the rites and rituals were at last codified, themselves lasting for a thousand years before the arrival of the English. It could have been that the mushrooms were mutagenic as well as entheogenic, but this is only a theory. Prince Madoc In January of AD 1170 Wikipedia:Prince Madoc (Madog ab Owain Gwynedd) arrived from Wales, settling along the coast of the modern day Virginia-North Carolina border before finding it inhospitable and moving on. Many of his party die. Acting on continued rumors of Saint Brendan's colonists still living further inland, Madoc's settlers eventually split in two to attempt to find them, each vowing to keep contact on their respective journeys. Predictably, the two parties soon lost contact, with the first being dispersed and absorbed into local Native American tribes, but the second succeeding, after a harrowing journey, in reaching the Dogfolk. For whatever reason -- perhaps due to greater numbers -- two separate but important changes occurred: the first is that the language of the Dogfolk began to undergo a shift favoring a more Brythonic (P-Celtic, as opposed to the Scottish and Irish Q-Celtic) sound; the second is that, through a mutation, the Dogfolk began to produce a weak phosphorescence in the scelerae of their eyes. This, in turn, gave rise to a growing awareness of them by Native American tribes, who viewed them with distrust and fear, giving them the collective name Wikipedia:Moon-eyed people. Biology The Dogfolk, unlike many other North American cryptids that survived into the Twenty-First Century, had both male and female sexes, which were sexually dimorphic in the extreme, in addition to having blood-kin relationships to creatures who, to the untrained eye, looked identical to Irish Wolfhounds or Scottish Deerhounds. Society and culture It is known that the females were, to a one, put in positions of high power and governance, because the Dogfolk males were considered to be too violent and sexual to be trusted with the delicate task of statecraft. Additionally, it was exclusively females who made up the priestly class of the Shaman, and males were forbidden to eat the sacred mushrooms reserved exclusively for them. Historiography Because Wanata was essentially disallowed from engaging with her heritage as a result of the pressure to conform after her marriage to Patrick Lynch, the sole remnant of her Dogfolk experience was crystallized in a small prayer which, translated into English, meant I will never let you go. This phrase became a familiar watchword in the Lynch family for over a century, even if its origin remained totally unknown. It thus fell to her brother to be the main repository of tribal knowledge. Unfortunately, the recollections of Wolkee were fragmentary and full of unhelpful vagueries: for instance, he understood that Wanata's husband Patrick had come from over the sea as his own people once had, but did know the exact names of the Atlantic Ocean or the island (country) of Ireland, even if he understood that he was, therefore, very distant kin to Patrick himself. Additionally, he was unaware as to the exact nature of the meanings behind the various rituals -- mating, pregnancy, birth, death, and so on -- and could not begin to ascribe the significance of the Trimark (the crescent occluded by three lines, adapted from an Ogham rune). The existence of the Dogfolk itself was at least contemporaneously known to Ohawas, as mentioned in "Her Judges Are Evening Wolves," however how and why she came about this knowledge is left deliberately murky. Far more helpful was the survey by Nicholas Tucker II in the 1650s, under lock-and-key in the study of Archibald Lightfoot many hundreds of years later, but perused in secret by his son Stephen. Category:Dogfolk